You give me the beat of mustang hooves racing across the plain, while the sky and clouds’ argument resolves into rain.

All this in an instant switches to a color-enhanced Andronicos food store, jars of dill and sweet pickles lining the shelves, Walt Whitman rubbing his beard by the cacao, traveler’s check in hand.

What am I supposed to do with this juxtaposition of chaos? I am like a long-necked heron fishing in the pale blue water of a drainage ditch while the mud-flats of the bay lie just across the highway.

You hold out a series of jewels, brilliant and just out of reach. Then laughing, pull back, toss me the cuteness of a kitten touching noses with a fawn.

An authentic experience? Sure, but when the rubber hits the road, everything tumbles back into cliché, the childhood catechism learned over breakfasts of biscuits and red-eyed gravy.

I want the weight of a backpack filled with clanky noise – backhoes growling in competition with howler monkeys.

I long to gnaw, chew, and claw my way into the dung-stench of your lion’s den. You deny it? Claim to have a boudoir of red satin sheets and white down comforters. Ha! At best you live in a ramshackle barn, withered corn husks underfoot, pure abstraction in a galvanized bucket.

You think I love you? I don’t. I am tied to you. Prometheus on the rock. You make me incinerate my soul for you just to taste that one glistening orange drop of freedom.

To take you as a demon lover is to sleep with a scorpion’s nest under my bed. There is no end to the battle. I give up all, become a hermit, restrict my life, just to stay embroiled with you, David and Goliath, but where is my sling?

Give me stillpoint. At night, when the stars murmur their songs, let me sing in their language. I want to understand the slow undulation of a gray whale in the deep ocean, navigating the currents, and the whispers of the tide.

You think I’ll settle for being frozen in this layer of glacial peat and ice, a gorse bush prickling my cheek? You think I won’t keep trying to squeeze out the one true and unique sentence that I will regard as the syrup from the belly of, you, the beast?

Will it be sweet? No. Toxic as hell. Stinking like burnt Brussells sprouts, but singing with the love of the mystery, that singular trapezoid of chance, that heartfelt pump of blood upon seizing the perfect spiral sea shell by the growling waves, pink and strawberry red, glittering in the sun.